A new study form the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, has found that a risk for alcoholism may also place people at a risk for obesity. There was an acknowledgement of the association between a family history of alcoholism and a risk of obesity. Both men and women with this family history were more likely to be obese in 2002 than ten years previously.
"In addiction research, we often look at what we call cross-heritability, which addresses the question of whether the predisposition to one condition also might contribute to other conditions," said study author Richard A. Grucza, Ph.D. "For example,alcoholism and drug abuse are cross-heritable. This new study demonstrates a cross-heritability between alcoholism and obesity, but it also says - and this is very important - that some of the risks must be a function of the environment. The environment is what changed between the 1990s and the 2000s. It wasn't people's genes."
The study's findings are significant. In this country, obesity has doubled from 15 percent in the late 1970s to 33 percent in 2004. People are considered obese if they have a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher. Obese people have an increased risk for high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain cancers.
"Much of what we eat nowadays contains more calories than the food we ate in the 1970s and 1980s, but it also contains the sort of calories that appeal to what are commonly called the reward centers in the brain. Alcohol and drugs affect those same parts of the brain, and our thinking was that because the same brain structures are being stimulated, overconsumption of those foods might be greater in people with a predisposition to addiction."
